


edgeshine

by radialarch



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: M/M, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Shaving, knifeplay as love language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:29:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25177699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/pseuds/radialarch
Summary: The boar was filthy. He needed a bath.Which was to say, on the next sunny day, Felix dragged Dimitri to the fishing pond and shoved him in.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 6
Kudos: 81





	edgeshine

**Author's Note:**

> twitter ficlet that grew out of control. theoretically for a prompt for hair-brushing, which, well. there's some hair in here, definitely.

Five years they searched for the boar, and in the end he led them back to Garreg Mach.

People came to the Officers Academy seeking many things. Women looking for husbands, boys wanting to defer responsibility for yet another year; nobles chasing some impossible notion of chivalry, and commoners with the sense to understand that the most dependable thing to stand between what you loved and ruin was a sword and the skill to wield it.

Felix knew what Dimitri had come to the Academy to find, and the Academy had given it to him, folded his fingers around the instrument of his own destruction and turned him loose to die. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that he’d returned here, then, a beast retreating to lick at his wounds. And he _was_ a beast, now; everyone knew it.

Dimitri had claimed a spot for himself in the ruins of the cathedral. Felix didn’t know what kind of a statement he thought he was making; Dimitri had never been one to take much solace in religion. Or maybe that was giving him too much credit. Beasts didn’t _think._ They were all instinct, nothing more.

The professor wouldn’t help. If anyone could get through, it would have been him: goddess-touched, grief-touched. The passage of time had not changed him at all, and Dimitri had liked the professor at the Academy. Had found his smile _charming_ and his skill admirable, and when Captain Jeralt died had promised to kill for him.

Now, the professor wouldn’t even touch him. “Better to leave him alone,” he’d said, like he understood something Felix didn’t. But Felix knew _Dimitri_. In some ways, it was the only thing he knew.

The boar was filthy. He needed a bath.

Which was to say, on the next sunny day, Felix dragged Dimitri to the fishing pond and shoved him in.

For a moment Dimitri didn’t struggle; he sank like a stone, while remnants of blood and dirt bloomed around him in a growing halo. Then there was the flash of his Crest and his head broke the surface. He was gasping, furious, blinking water from his eyes.

“What is the meaning of this?” he growled, and Felix tossed him a bar of soap.

“You’re disgusting,” he said. “I can’t stand it any longer.” The sunlight was coaxing glints of gold back out of Dimitri’s wet hair, and the shock had brought color into his face. It was the first time since they found him that he looked alive.

Dimitri stared at him. Felix stared back. At one point in their lives Felix would have looked away first, unable to withstand the force of Dimitri’s regard; at another, Dimitri, eager to hide again behind the mask. Now, they were at an impasse, neither of them willing to lose. Mostly, what this meant was that the boar’s furred cloak got more and more waterlogged until it nearly strangled him.

“This is pointless,” he spat, while he tore loose the pin from his throat, but his hand dug into fur that had gone a dingy grey, and the sight seemed to strike him somehow. Where had he even gotten that thing? It was Blaiddyd colors, at least marginally, and he wore it on his back like a fucking target.

There was no point in expecting finesse from Dimitri. He worked over the cloak haphazardly, as the soap grew smaller and smaller in his grasp, and when he decided he’d finished he simply ducked back underwater, came up with his eyes shut and his hands tangled in his hair. It was still an improvement over what he’d been before. A dozen times more, and he might have nearly passed for human.

“Satisfied?” he asked as he pulled himself up onto the dock. The cloak slithered after him with a wet thump. He was on one knee, looking up at Felix with a sardonic eye, which meant that Felix was looking down. Up close, the patchy scruff across Dimitri’s jaw looked even worse.

“With you? Not likely,” he said, and drew his knife.

Dimitri didn’t react. Felix didn’t know what he’d hoped for, but the lack of it made him ungentle as he knelt and tilted Dimitri’s chin up with a hand beneath his jaw. “Stay still,” he said, while the knife gleamed, and felt worse when Dimitri did.

Felix kept his weapons sharp. Slowly, the strokes of his blade revealed flushed skin, the sharp line of Dimitri’s jaw. As he went, his thumb traced the plane of Dimitri’s cheek, the divot of his upper lip, and Dimitri’s breathing got slower and slower while Felix’s knife glided along the underside of his jaw, down and down. He’d been careful; he’d drawn no blood. Beneath his hands was the face of a man, one that Felix knew like his own.

He had the knife at Dimitri’s throat still, and Dimitri’s eye blinked, slow; shut. His breath was warm against the side of Felix’s off-hand.

A flick of his wrist, and he could put the beast out of its misery. He might have even thanked Felix for it. He knelt there for a long, suspended moment, acutely aware of the sun beating down, water trickling down his forearms; and then, with a low wretched noise, pulled back.

Five years chasing rumors, and he’d never looked for a body. He couldn’t. He _couldn’t_.

It took Dimitri another moment to open his eye again. By then Felix had already wiped off the knife and sheathed it. “What,” he said. “Get up. I’m done with you.”

When Dimitri smiled, there was teeth in it. “I have my ghosts,” he said. “And so, I think, do you.”

The problem with knowing Dimitri: he knew Felix, too. “Take care of yourself,” he spat. “I won’t do it again.” Then he turned on his heels and left; but no matter how far he got from the dock, he couldn’t shake the weight of Dimitri’s gaze. That was, in the end, the nature of Felix’s haunting. Dimitri would never let him go.

Or maybe it was the other way around.

**Author's Note:**

> intsys give us the forbidden dimitri scruff!!!


End file.
